On the value of being afraid

In the Cycle of Life of an emergency manager in Florida there are 3 seasons: Hurricane season, the Christmas holiday season, and Getting Ready for Hurricane season. There is comfort in this cycle, in the repetition of tasks, and orientation to a new purpose. If this is January then it's time to get ready for June 1st.

As I have in the last half-dozen years, I entered this particular season with a sense of foreboding and even fear. What if this is the year the Big One hits Florida? Am I ready? Is the SERT ready? Is the national mass care community ready? And if the answer to any one of these questions is NO, then what must I do to get them ready?

To give you a sense of what I'm talking about, to relieve your concern that I am being overly dramatic, let me say that my idea of the Big One is a storm equivalent in size and intensity to the one that pulverized the Philippines last year. And my nightmare is that this storm strikes the 6.5 million people in southeast Florida. I will leave details of such a disaster to your imagination. I have been in enough disasters to have developed a vivid picture of everything such a disaster would entail.

Of all the worrying questions that spring to my mind as the Cycle turns to January I can only control one: Am I ready? And the answer I give myself every time is that I am more ready this year than I was the year before. Whatever that means. As for the other questions, those that involve people and organizations that I cannot control but only influence, I can only wonder if they are as scared as I am.

In Kuwait, on my way home, the Army asked me if I had ever been scared during the ten months that I had spent in Iraq. I said no. I was wrong. There were a number of times that I was scared in Iraq. Fear is a rational response to real or perceived risk. Being afraid focuses the mind and can improve performance.

So why did I give the wrong answer? I have thought about this a lot. Was it the myth that Real Men don't get scared? Was it the fact that I had not engaged in direct combat with the enemy, been subjected to the many horrors of warfare, and thus had no right to say that I had ever been scared? No. Rather, I believe that I misinterpreted the question. I perceived the question to be, not whether I was scared (although that was the word used in the sentence I read), but whether I was terrified. Terror is an irrational response to a real or perceived risk and degrades performance, sometimes to the point that one is ineffective at almost any task. I had been scared, but never terrified. I cannot say, if circumstances had been different, whether I would have ever been seized with terror. I like to believe that the answer to that is no, but I have never subjected my vivid imagination to such a test.

I am afraid of the Big Hurricane hitting my state, and me being in a position of responsibility to do something about it, and to be prepared for the eventuality. There's value in being afraid of some things.

But I'm not terrified: at least, not now.

A camel ride to the Niger River

Why would anyone pay thousands of dollars to travel thousands of miles to a remote, river settlement on the edge of the Sahara desert? An excellent question that I failed to ask myself until I arrived in Niamey, Niger on a sleek Air France flight from Paris. The scene was reminiscent, if one were imaginative, of the arrival of a riverboat in Vicksburg during the 19th Century.

Actually, I exaggerate. Niamey has a population of 1.3 million people and Niger a population of 17 million, close to the population of Florida. Niger, like Senegal, lies in the Sahel of West Africa. The Sahel is a three thousand plus mile band, stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea, of semi-arid land that divides the Sahara desert from the wooded savannah to the south.

What that means is the landscape is dotted with gnarled trees, twisted by the wind, in a sea of brown grass. The River Niger, swollen from the seasonal rains, courses through the center of Niamey, and is both the origin and the sustenance of the city. Two bridges are prominent when viewed from the air: the Kennedy Bridge, donated by the U.S. government, and another, newer bridge to the east, donated by the Chinese government.

So why did I come? First, I could cite the educational advantages of international travel. In Niger, I learned how the untrained eye (like mine) can differentiate between the types of scrawny, white animals seeking slim sustenance in the countryside. A goat's tail is pointed up, for example, while a sheep's tail is pointed down. It's hard to tell the difference otherwise because the sheep have neither the need nor the desire to generate a lot of wool.

The day after we arrived we headed west out of Niamey with two other Americans to have an adventure. The entertainment options in the Capital City are limited so we chose a camel ride and a boat trip on the River. After stopping to pay a toll we turned off the hard surface road at the golf course sign. The golf course, on the right side of the dirt path we were following, had a driving range and piece of bare, packed earth with a hole and a flag in the middle.

The Driving Range and "Putting Green."

Shortly after, we reached the river's edge. The camels, huddled in the shade of some trees with their attendant herders, were underwhelmed at our arrival. Omar, our guide for the brief journey, hailed from a local village on the River. He negotiated the price with the chief camel-herder, a Father Time look-alike. For 7 thousand CFA (about $14) per camel we would be transported 5 kilometers to another village where we would meet a boat for the return journey.

Omar and Father Time negotiate a price.

I had never ridden a camel before. I have seen camels in Turkey, Kuwait, Iraq and Senegal. I have ridden horses in Florida and an ornery mule up the side of Yosemite Valley, but nary a camel. And let me add that the phrase "riding a camel" is not on my bucket list.

The trick to getting on a camel.

But maybe I came to Niamey because I believe that I should force myself to do new and different things. Memories of everyday life are as smooth as river pebbles that wash down to a forgotten sea. The new and different create memories that are hard, jagged, at times unpleasant, but always vivid. They cling like barnacles to the chronicles of our lives, rich stories that ripen with each telling.

My backside still carries memories of that camel ride, but I hope the damage is not permanent. I don't mean to complain, but the thin strips of cloth separating the hard, wooden slats of the saddle from my rear end were thinner than those offered to my companions. Forty five minutes into our hour journey every position I tried had passed uncomfortable and had arrived at painful. Omar noticed my distress and advised me to move forward in the saddle as far as possible and cross my legs over the camel's neck. This was a dramatic relief and a great improvement in my morale. Another example of the educational benefits of travel: tips on camel riding.

The highlight of the boat trip (of the day) was a cautious survey of three hippos in the River. Evidently, hippos are not the happy, jovial, clumsy, vegetarian animals of Disney lore. They have the disposition of an NFL linebacker in a Playoff game.

Omar and I taking pictures of the hippos. We were too far away for a good shot.

While we returned on the boat to our departure point and our cars, I had to chance to chat with Omar. He desired to improve his English in talking to me, but we settled by silent agreement on my limited French as a better form of communication. He tried to interest me in some of the American rap songs on his phone, but I replied that those songs were for the "juene," or young people.

He searched his memory, hand to chin, staring into the distance, and came up with a name for a band that fit my demographic.

"Phil Collins?" He asked me.

I nodded. Close enough.

That night Lindsey, Gale and I went to an notable French restaurant in Niamey. The restaurant is notable because some foreigners in Niamey will eat at only two restaurants, and this was one of them. I have vivid memories of every incident of food poisoning in my life, and would hesitate to criticize anyone who wanted to avoid a repeat of the experience.

The food was delicious and the Bordeaux wine was excellent. In the midst of our delightful conversation I remembered why we decided to come to Niamey. She was sitting right next to me.

We came to see our daughter's home, the city she lived in, the place where she worked, and the people that were a part of her life. I had just arrived and the price was already worth it.

First thoughts on Typhoon Haiyan and the Philippines

I have never been to the Philippines or read much about it but I could have written, pre-landfall, 75% of the content of ALL the news articles that have come out in the three days since the storm hit. 

The journalists are SHOCKED, SHOCKED that the disaster is much worse than expected. No one expected that the water would rise so high. The Category 5 winds caused a "remarkable" amount of roof damage. The survivors started looting businesses after the storm "in search of necessities." A survivor will be quoted, within 24 hours of impact, as being SHOCKED at the poor response of the government: "Don't they understand how desperate things are here?" International aid organizations will promise relief, and send teams to "assess" the situation. The U.S. military will dispatch supplies, planes and ships "at the request of the Philippines government."

And, of course, global warming may be involved.

Do me a favor. Go look up on Google maps the city of Tacloban, on Leyte Island in the Philippines (it's not that hard). Tacloban looks like its at the bottom of an inverted cup placed at the junction of a 90 degree angle of the East side of the island (or, the side of the approaching storm). I looked at the map before landfall and knew, without benefit of a hurricane evacuation study, that all of the storm surge generated by this enormous storm would be funneled into the bottom of the cup. I knew right away that Tacloban would be in severe trouble from storm surge alone.

Next, go to the National Hurricane Center site and click on the link to the left entitled "Wind Scale." There you can read about the types of damage to be expected from a Category 5 storm: "Catastrophic damage will occur: A high percentage of framed homes will be destroyed, with total roof failure and wall collapse. Fallen trees and power poles will isolate residential areas. Power outages will last for weeks to possibly months. Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks or months."

Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks or months. Hummnnn. 

Let's go back to the fact that Tacloban is on an Island. Granted, it's a big island, but this big island doesn't have Interstate 10 crossing the island, nor does it have I-75 connecting the north to the south. That means relief supplies have to be brought in by plane. Or by boat, when the port is opened.

They don't have enough planes or money or time to take care of 200,000 people in those conditions. And I equate their conditions to be like trying to survive in the middle of the Libyan  desert. Every plane that flies into Tacloban airport should be leaving full of people. When the boats and ships start arriving (and they should be on the way) they should drop off supplies and haul back people.

If the government of the Philippines hasn't figures this out yet then people are going to start dying. The World English Dictionary defines uninhabitable as "not capable of being lived in." The only way to bring the supply of food, water and shelter into equilibrium with supply in this situation is to reduce the demand. The increased rate of mortality will achieve this end but the more civilized approach is to bring the people to a place that they can be sustained at the First Level of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

When (not if) the Category 5 storm hits Miami the same type of calculus will come into play. Miami-Dade County is not an island but it's close. It's at the very end of a long peninsula, with 2.5 million people (not 200k) crammed into a narrow strip of land between the Atlantic Ocean and the Everglades.

When the Cat 5 comes we are going to start having to bus and fly them out as fast as we can.

"You can't make them leave!" I have already heard the naysayers shout.

Oh, I agree. A good portion of them will be screaming to get out. Live. On national television.  

Let's see what happens in the Philippines the next few weeks and months. We may see a preview of coming attractions. I hope the right people are watching, and that they learn the right lessons. 

Once upon a time ... a mass care story

Once upon a time, in the land of hurricanes, King Craig Fugate brought together all the emergency managers and all  the voluntary agencies and the private sector and even some Femites to devise a plan to save the kingdom from the evil Big One that they all knew would some day threaten their very existence. Just as all good stories have a villain, so must all good emergency plans have a scenario. The scenario offered up was called Hurricane Ono, a Category 5 hurricane that struck southeast Florida, rampaged across the peninsula to Tampa, renewed strength in the Gulf and hit the state again in the Panhandle. As an added prize, the scenario included a failure of the Herbert Hoover dike around Lake Okeechobee, with the total inundation of the adjacent communities.

The Evil Stepmother who first presented this scenario to the assembled State Emergency Response Team (SERT) in Tallahassee in 2007 was Carla Boyce, at that time the SERT's Plans Chief (and now an Important Person at FEMA Headquarters). Her presentation had a profound affect on me. In one way or the other most of my thoughts and actions in emergency management and mass care since that moment have been directed toward preparing for such an event.

We worked on the plan for two years. We brought in some smart people from the Red Cross, Salvation Army and the Southern Baptists with hard earned experience and I learned a lot of mass care from them. We spent a lot of time trying to answer some pretty basic questions. How many meals per day would we need to produce and distribute? Who would provide them? How many shelter teams would we need? Where would they come from?

I remember thinking that the mass care community has been doing this for a long time. Why haven't they come up with a standard process to make these kinds of calculations? I mean, we were coming up with astronomical meal and shelter requirements. How do we know these numbers are right? We didn't, and still don't. Plus, I had a nagging problem that wasn't solved in the plan. When you ask for the WORLD and the WORLD shows up, you're going to need a helluva lot of people to tell all those trucks where to go.

We tested our plan, using the Hurricane Ono scenario, during the May 2009 State Hurricane Suiter Exercise. This was the last State Exercise for King Craig. He had been nominated, but not yet confirmed, as the new Director of FEMA during the time of the exercise. For some reason we had massive, and unprecedented, participation from FEMA Region 4 during that exercise.

Hurricane Ike, which had struck Texas in September of 2008, had already had an influence on the plan and the 2009 exercise. The disaster feeding in Texas during Ike, according to multiple, conflicting reports, had been ugly. I had a number of long conversations with FEMA, state and voluntary agency participants with first hand knowledge of the events. The root cause of the problem was a lack of coordination.

I was determined to do whatever I could to make sure that such a problem did not happen in Florida. In January 2009 I emailed Lynn Crabb, at that time the lead for Mass Care at Red Cross Headquarters, that we needed to get the mass care voluntary agencies together with FEMA and the states (well, at LEAST Florida) and do a "Vulcan mind meld" to resolve this problem. Mickey Caison, the disaster lead for the Southern Baptists, had the same idea and was in a better position to do something about it.

At Mickey's behest, FEMA Headquarters Mass Care assembled a team of subject matter experts from multiple stakeholders on a series of conference calls with the objective of creating a Multi-Agency Feeding Plan Template. I was fortunate to be a part of these conference calls, which ultimately grew to over 40 participants. This document was the first big step toward creating some kind of state mass care doctrine.

Before the Feeding Plan Template was even finished I drafted a State of Florida Multi-Agency Feeding Plan and sent it out to all of our stakeholders for comments. What was significant about this plan was that we included the private sector food suppliers (Sysco & US Foods) in the planning process. As a result, and as was my intention, Florida published the first Multi-Agency Feeding Plan in the nation.

I rushed to get the plan completed because I wanted to test the plan during the 2009 Hurricane Suiter Exercise. There was just one problem. Both the Feeding Plan Template and the State Feeding Plan called for the creation, under specified circumstances, of a Multi-Agency Feeding Task Force (FTF). What was a FTF supposed to do? The Plan wasn't real clear about that. Some kind of multi-agency coordination involving feeding. We think.

So I decided that we were going to establish a FTF during the 2009 Hurricane Suiter Exercise. I was able to round up a bunch of smart guys who knew a lot about their little piece of disaster feeding and I put them all in a room on the third floor of the building next door to the EOC during the exercise. I got Rick Hinrichs from the San Diego Chapter of the Red Cross, and Fritz Wilson from the Florida Baptists, and Kevin Smith from the Florida Division of the Salvation Army, among others. The hardest part was to get Sysco and US Foods to agree to be in the same room together. They eyed each other during the exercise until they realized that we could generate more business than either one could handle.

We all learned a lot about how we should and shouldn't coordinate mass care at a state EOC during the 2009 Hurricane Suiter Exercise. I learned that no matter how smart I thought I was, that no matter how much knowledge and experience that I had coordinating mass care at the state level, and no matter how hard I was prepared to work at getting my job done right, I couldn't be in three different critical EOC meetings at the same time. And we learned that a feeding task force was a good idea but wouldn't be effective unless it had an operational procedure that defined internal TF roles, tasks and processes.

I had participated in a dozen state hurricane exercises and I had learned more in the 2009 exercise than I had in all the other exercises put together. I was eager to do it again in 2010. But the Deepwater Horizon disaster blew the 2010 exercise out of the water and the EOC Continuity of Operations exercise scheduled for 2010 was rescheduled for 2011. In the Fall of 2011 I started thinking about what kind of mass care exercise we needed to have in 2012.

Another big thing that I learned from the 2009 exercise was that when the Big One hit Florida we would need a lot of help in the EOC. And we couldn't fill the gap by grabbing state workers off the street and thrusting them in the EOC in half-day increments like we did in 2004-2005. We needed people who knew mass care and were able to step into an EOC and be effective with some preliminary training.

Where could we get these kind of people? The voluntary agencies, like the Red Cross, didn't train their people to perform these roles. Neither did the Salvation Army. There were few, if any, State Mass Care Coordinators out there. And those that had the experience were on the hurricane prone coastal states and not likely candidates to be released to come help me during hurricane season.

The big disaster event in 2011 was Tropical Storm Irene. I benefited from an EMAC deployment to New Jersey during Irene. When I returned to work I developed a Power Point presentation saying that Florida was going to hold a National Mass Care Exercise in Tallahassee in conjunction with the State Hurricane Exercise in May 2012. I emailed this presentation to everyone I knew in the national mass care community and said that anyone willing to pay their way to Tallahassee was welcome to play in my sandbox.

But who I really wanted to come to the Exercise were my state counterparts and I knew that they wouldn't be lining up to come because they had no money. I contacted Waddy Gonzalez, the head of FEMA Mass Care, and explained how I was doing him a BIG FAVOR by putting on this National Mass Care Exercise, and was helping him do his job of increasing mass care capability in the states. All he had to do was find the money to pay for some state people to come to the exercise. Waddy, to his great credit, came up with the money for 5 state people to attend.

Thus we were able to get the participation of Wendy Stewart from Georgia, Daniel Porth from Arizona, Dennis Dura from New Jersey, Dante Glinecki from Missouri and Ed Lyons from Arkansas. Ultimately we were able to get 64 participants from 26 federal, state, nongovernmental, private sector and academic agencies. Arguably, this was the largest mass care exercise ever conducted in the nation.

I had no budget and no staff available to make this happen. Fortunately, I had lots of friends in the mass care community who saw the inherent benefits to the nation of the exercise and agreed to help. Jono Anzalone with FEMA Region VII (now with the Red Cross) volunteered to be the Lead Controller for the Exercise and offered Cory Fast and Kam Kennedy from his staff to help with the project. Ryan Logan, the Mass Care Lead for FEMA Region IV (also now with the Red Cross) pitched in to help with the planning for the exercise. More people, too many to name here (I'll forget somebody and be in trouble) were instrumental in the success of the exercise.

As more and more people started saying that they were coming I started to get worried. How was I going to productively utilize all these people? And a bigger problem, where was I going to put them all? They wouldn't fit in the EOC.

Based on feedback from the 2009 exercise we updated the State Feeding Plan and drafted a Feeding Task Force (FTF) Standard Operating Guide (SOG). One of our objectives for the 2012 exercise was to test the new plan and to establish a Feeding TF to test the new SOG. So why not set up a Sheltering TF? And as the number of participants grew higher we added on a Distribution of Relief Supplies TF. And I had to scramble with the Florida Division of Emergency Management Exercise people to find rooms for these TFs within easy walking distance of the State EOC. In the end, this was good preparation for us because we would need to do the same thing if the Big One were ever to happen.

The 2012 Hurricane Gispert Exercise was a success, but not because we did everything perfectly. We allocated a lot of resources to capturing the lessons we were learning and we had a long list of things that we screwed up. Some of the horde of people who arrived were put to work as Evaluators and Kam Kennedy was assigned to be in charge of Documentation. To that end, we had Hot Wash meetings at the end of each day and Kam made everyone do daily written critiques. All of the information that she collected was put into the After Action Report (AAR).

A significant source of the problems we encountered in the exercise was that what we were trying to do was hard and few participants had the training or the experience to have a clear idea of what we were trying to accomplish. In essence, we were simultaneously trying to create, train and exercise state mass care doctrine to 60 people in 4 days. Doing that is really hard, in case you were wondering.

I was thrilled at what we were able to learn in 4 days. And the best part was that 5 state mass care people were able to take hard earned knowledge and experience back to their states. Dennis Dura, from New Jersey, participated in the exercise and put what he learned to good use 5 months later when Hurricane Sandy struck his state. Furthermore, as a result of the contacts he made at the exercise, he was able to bring Daniel Porth from Arizona to New Jersey for the Sandy response.

Once we got the Exercise AAR completed and posted to the Internet on July 1 I set to work translating the lessons learned into new state plans and procedures. The State of Florida does not do sheltering but supports county and municipality shelter operations. The state has never had a Multi-Agency Shelter Support  Plan but the myriad issues with functional needs support in general population shelters and the complex problems with transitioning shelter survivors to appropriate housing made it seem like a good idea at the time.  The New Shelter Support Plan, of course, would establish criteria for the activation of a Shelter Task Force. Sheltering wasn't really an area of my expertise. So I had to pester some smart people who knew what they were talking about, like Rick Schofield of the Red Cross, in order to get the document written.

The 2012 Exercise revealed that a Shelter TF without a Shelter Plan or an operational procedure was about as much good as a beached whale. So to get ready for the 2013 Exercise we had to write (and coordinate) a Shelter Support Plan, a Shelter TF operational procedure, a revised ESF 6 operational procedure, and updates to the Feeding Plan and Feeding TF operational procedure. I had a lot of work to do.

As usual, real life gets in the way of our dreams. In June we had Tropical Storm Debby and in August Tropical Storm Issac. Then I deployed in response to Sandy for 3 weeks in November. As a consequence we didn't complete the updates and rewrites of all the plans and procedures until April, a month before the exercise.

Ahh, the exercise. I had to round up the usual suspects again to help me put on this big exercise for which I still had no staff or budget. The grim reality that I faced was of my two biggest partners, the Red Cross was in the middle of re-engineering and FEMA was battling the Sequester. But we got it done.

We got state mass care people from big states and little states from all corners of the country: Larry Shine from Texas, Tracy McBroom from California (now with the Red Cross), Sue Bush from Washington and Dwayne Hubert from Maine. The Sequester cut down on the number of Femites in attendance but we had the same wide representation from agencies representing the Whole of the National Mass Care Community. We learned a lot and gave a lot of people some good training. Once again, Kam Kennedy helped document the lessons learned that were included in the 2013 National Mass Care Exercise After Action Report.

Now, once again, I am updating plans and procedures to reflect what we learned. We are going to hold the Exercise in Tallahassee one more time in 2014 but are looking to give somebody else an opportunity to shine (and do some of the work). California has shown interest in hosting the Exercise in 2015 and Texas in 2016.

But, and to the point of this epistle, to get where we need to be we need to implement the National Mass Care Strategy. The Strategy emphasizes the standardization of mass care terminology, procedures and processes. Holding these national exercises allows the mass care community to come together and sort out the process of how we coordinate mass care at the state level. As you can tell from the story that I just related, the process of building a state mass care doctrine didn't start until 2009.

To make these National Mass Care Exercises more effective in building national mass care capability we need to give the participants additional training and preparation before they arrive at the exercise. An unfortunate number of the participants in the 2012 and 2013 exercises looked like High School football players at an NFL game. They had neither the training nor the experience to perform at a high level in that environment. And this wasn't their fault. The agencies involved need to do better at building the capability to provide the right people with the right skills.

The U.S. Army has a course called the Command & General Staff College to prepare senior captains and majors to be staff officers and planners. At the end of the course they select a few of the elite graduates to take additional training in high-level planning. At the end of this extra training these officers are sent out to regular assignments in the Army, a resource to be harvested in need. And when a 4 star general has a need for planners for an important operation, these officers are plucked from whatever job they have and collected at the 4 star's headquarters. They work 20 hours a day for 2 weeks writing and briefing a plan for the 4 star. Then they go back to their regular jobs.

The Army calls these planners Jedi Knights.

The mass care community needs to build their own cadre of mass care Jedi Knights. And the American Red Cross, as the True Leader of mass care in the nation, needs to be the agency to lead the way and set the example in this regard.

The Red Cross and historic flooding in Colorado

On Tuesday night, September 17 I was sitting at home watching the Braves lose another game to the Nats when I got a phone call from a local emergency manager in Colorado. He got my phone number from a friend of a friend and wanted to "pick my brain" about the long term shelter problem he was facing.

For Colorado, the Big One had finally arrived. And for the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, the Baptists, and the state/local emergency managers involved in mass care in the state this is the Big Test. Are they prepared? Did all that time they spent writing plans, teaching classes, and conducting exercises build the required level of capability in Mass Care Services required?

Based on media reports and my discussions with friends responding to the disaster the answer is Yes. Has everything gone perfectly? Good Lord, if that's your standard then you'll never be happy. It's a disaster. If everything was all right then we wouldn't have a job as emergency managers. The problem we always face is that when the disaster strikes the citizens have never read our perfectly drafted plans. They don't obey our carefully crafted public messages. They insist on acting in what they perceive to be their best interests at the time.

Imagine.

The first rule of emergency management is that the citizens will do whatever they want, regardless of what they've been advised. The second rule is that no matter what we do, it won't be enough - especially when it comes to mass care. So if you're in the job accept these rules, move on and do the best you can to help the most.

The Big News in this disaster has come from the Red Cross. For the first time in my knowledge the Red Cross Disaster Relief Operation is organizing according to the Incident Command System (ICS) and issuing daily Incident Action Plans (IAP). For me, this is great news and long overdue.

There has been a lot of discussion (at least, if you hang out with the people I do) about the re-engineering the Red Cross has undergone and is still undergoing. Change is painful and controversial. I was not privy to the reasons for the current re-engineering and no one is in a position now to know how successful it will be.

I have discovered (to my dismay) that there are some people who devote an inordinate amount of time criticizing the Red Cross. The Red Cross is a big organization that plays an important role in disaster responses of all size in every corner of our nation.  Public institutions in our society must expect to be criticized and such criticisms are often required to drive needed changes. An institution like the Red Cross, which survives primarily on public donations, is especially sensitive to public criticisms.

Yet most of the criticisms of the Red Cross that I hear are motivated more by destruction than a desire for change. Unfortunately, this is common in much of our social discourse these days. In my view, the critics have an unreasonable expectation of the capabilities of the Red Cross and, in some cases, an unreasoning sense of entitlement. Both of these problems apply to the Staten Island politician who, in the days after Sandy struck, publicly denounced the performance of the Red Cross only to discover that no, no, the Red Cross doesn't perform search and rescue operations in the immediate aftermath of the disaster.

We need the Red Cross. We need the idea of the Red Cross - the idea that we can respond to disasters with volunteers and donations. We can get mad at people in the Red Cross. The people who are human and make mistakes and do stupid things. But we can't confuse the people in the Red Cross with the idea of the Red Cross. We need the idea of the Red Cross. The people will come and go. We need the idea to live on.

Shelter Transition Teams

In June 2012 Tropical Storm Debby dumped over 25 inches of rain on the City of Live Oak, the County Seat of Suwannee County in North Florida. When I got to the State EOC the morning of June 26 I read Information Message #155 from Suwannee County on the EM Constellation Message System. The Message, titled "Evacuations/Roads", and posted at 0556 hours, read in its entirety, "Suwannee County is evacuating many many houses within the County as well as City of Live Oak, US Hwy 90 and Pine is waist deep... We are contacting local air boat owners and school bus persons to assist with evacuations." A quick check of Google Maps revealed that the intersection of "US Hwy 90 and Pine" was in downtown Live Oak.

The day before, seeing as it was "just" a Tropical Storm, I saw no reason to cancel my plane flight to Atlanta for the FEMA Region IV Individual Assistance Conference. Hmmmmm, I thought, after reading the message. I don't think I'm going to Atlanta. I called my good friend Ryan Logan at FEMA Region IV (woke him up) and gave him the bad news.

About 2 weeks later the Shelter Report for the state was down to one shelter open, in Suwannee County, with a population that had dropped to and stayed at around 50 people. Mike Delorenzo, the SERT Chief, declared in the State EOC that the priority for the disaster was to get the Suwannee County Shelter closed. I turned to Beth Boyd, the Red Cross liaison in the State EOC and said, "OK, Beth, get the shelter closed."

As the State Mass Care Coordinator that was about all that I could do. In the state of Florida, shelters are a local issue and getting everyone out of the shelter was the responsibility of the local authorities. Even if I wanted to help I had no resources to bring to bear on the problem. Bryan Koon, the Director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, commented at the TS Debby "hot wash" that we took too long to get the shelter in Suwannee County closed.

I agreed, and started looking into possible solutions. I discovered a best practice that was utilized with some success during the Alabama tornadoes in 2011 and even (in some places) during Hurricane Sandy in 2012: the Shelter Transition Team. As we drafted Florida's new State Shelter Support Plan we incorporated the Shelter Transition Team concept into the document.

As we are all aware the introduction of a new concept into a plan requires development of a process for execution in a disaster and the acceptance and understanding of this new concept and process by the various stakeholders. The biggest stakeholders and beneficiaries of the Shelter Transition Team are the local emergency managers. I began introducing this concept to them at training sessions in October 2012 at well as at the Governor's Hurricane Conference and State Hurricane Exercise in May of this year.

The message that I communicated to the local emergency managers was that the process began when the County requested a Shelter Transition Team from the State. This would be done in the same manner that the Counties request any other resources from the state. When this request arrives at the State EOC the responsibility for coordinating this mission would be assigned to State ESF #6, Mass Care. That's me.

I do not have a cache of Jedi Knights in Tallahassee that I can send to the counties in response to this request in order to solve their shelter transition problems. The assignment of the mission to ESF #6 signifies two important things: 1) The County has asked the State for assistance in transitioning their shelter populations, and 2) The State Emergency Response Team (SERT) Chief has directed the State Mass Care Coordinator (me) to marshal federal, state and nongovernmental agency resources toward the outcome of moving all shelter residents to appropriate housing (as specified in the State Shelter Support Plan).

This is important to the County emergency managers (or so I have/will explain to them) because in a disaster closing the shelters is one of a list of problems they are wrestling with and the shelters may not even make the Top 10 on the list. Secondly, none of the federal, state and nongovernmental agencies that can bring resources to bear to get the people out of the shelters and into appropriate housing work for the County Emergency Manager. Third, the actions of the federal, state and nongovernmental agencies are seldom well-coordinated at the local (or even state) level.

So how would this Shelter Transition Team work at the local level? The process we are developing in Florida begins, as I said before, with a request by the County to the State. The second step is that the county either a) designates a local Shelter Transition Team Leader, or b) approves a local representative nominated by one of the agencies in the State Shelter Support Plan to be the Team Leader.

The Team Leader would become the local coordination point for all the agencies working to transition the shelter residents to appropriate housing. This coordination could be performed through regular meetings and/or conference calls. The Team Leader would also be in regular contact with State ESF #6 in order to exchange information and get assistance with resolving multi-agency disputes (which, in disasters, is a common occurrence).

I am under no illusions that getting any of this done in a disaster would be easy. FEMA and the American Red Cross are also big stakeholders in this process and we need to work with them to determine how they can help to make this concept work in Florida. I hope that we can get the detailed coordination finalized before we have to actually use this plan in a disaster.

With the peak of hurricane season approaching.... Well, this is one of my top priorities.